Chrome devices to be powered by Rockchip RK-3288?

bySagnik RoyonMay 26, 2014

Rockchip RK3288 powered Chrome OS devices might hit the market soon. In April this year, Rockchip, the Chinese chip maker company gave a demo show of Chromium OS running in their prototype board. And recently we have heard Google’s Francois Beaufort reporting that a new ARM development board featuring the same processor is functioning at the Chrome OS repository. This means, the Chrome OS is being checked on Rockchip processor and if things go well, we might see Chrome OS devices running on this chipset soon.

The RK3288 chip is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A17 processor with Arm Mali-T764 graphics which can give us the first ARM-based Chrome OS system. Chrome OS devices have always featured Intel processors. There are only a few exceptions of Samsung and HP models which feature Samsung Exynos5 dual-core or octa-core chips. But a point of concern remains as Rockchip is comparatively new and whether it will stand out well enough in terms of performance and power consumption, in comparison to Samsung, is something we will have to wait and watch.

Chromium OS, which was run as a demo on Rockchip is basically an open version of the Chrome OS. It acts as a testing ground for bug fixes, performance improvements and upcoming features. We know that every device that comes up in the Chromium code does not necessarily make it to the market. But all of the ones being launched definitely go through the Chromium codes although they are obscured by code names. So there is quite a high chance that this testing procedure will soon materialize into something concrete. The code name given to the Rockchip RK3288 is Veyron, and we do look forward to this ARM processor collaborating with Chrome OS to launch a few devices.